Create a USB Drive for Windows Server 2019 Installation

This blog post covers how you can create a bootable USB media drive to install Windows Server 2019 on a physical server. This blog post will not use any third party tools, it only uses build in tools which you can find on Windows 10 or Windows Server. Depending on your system you will need it to install it on a BIOS system or a UEFI based system, which is slightly different since UEFI will use GPT disks and BIOS will use a MBR disk.

Getting ready to create a USB Drive for a Windows Server 2019 Installation

First you will need to have all prerequisites in place.

Download the Windows Server 2019 ISO File

A USB Drive with at least 8GB size

Windows Server 2019 USB Thumb Drive for UEFI (GPT) systems

To create the USB drive to install Windows Server 2019 on a UEFI (GPT system, you basically do the following steps:

The at least a 8GB USB drive has to be formatted in FAT32

The USB needs to be GPT and not MBR

Copy all files from the ISO to the USB drive

This is it, and here is how you do it. First plugin your USB drive to your computer.

Open a PowerShell using the Run as Administrator option. You will need to change the path of the Windows Server 2019 ISO and you will need to replace the USB Friendly Name in the script.

REMINDER: The following commands will wipe the USB Drive completely. So backup everything before you run through the PowerShell.

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# Define Path to the Windows Server 2019 ISO

$ISOFile="C:\Temp\WindowsServer2019.iso"

# Get the USB Drive you want to use, copy the friendly name

Get-Disk|Where BusType-eq"USB"

# Get the right USB Drive (You will need to change the FriendlyName)

$USBDrive=Get-Disk|Where FriendlyName-eq"Kingston DT Workspace"

# Replace the Friendly Name to clean the USB Drive (THIS WILL REMOVE EVERYTHING)

Sorry forgot to remove it from the PowerShell Comment. Copy Past error 🙂 I used the script for a ISO where the install.wim was larger than 4GB, in that case you need to split it first before you can copy it.

I thought that Windows Server 2019 was supposed to fit on one single-layer DVD. The original release did, because I actually made such a DVD. The fixed one seems to be just a little too big, which strikes me as being sloppy. Burning a DVD is a lot easier than typing Powershell commands!

Thank you for the post which worked well. However I cannot get 2019 to boot after the I initial installation and I am starting to suspect every thing. I get a flashing cursor and 4hat is it. Can 2019 run in bios mode? Previously I have just played on a hyperv session with 2019.

As Graham Goddard has stated, I was getting the “Initialize-Disk : The disk has already been initialized.” error after the Clear-Disk command when my drive had an MBR partition style. Graham’s command helped me but it alone did not do it as the $USBDrive variable was still referencing the old MBR drive instance and not the newly-updated GPT instance. These two commands after the Clear-Disk command got me back on track (the second one needs to be updated for each user just like the very first version of this command needs to be updated for us):

At this point, I also could still not run the Initialize-Disk command but it didn’t seem to be necessary, so I continued without it.

Next, the “$Volume | Get-Partition | Set-Partition -IsActive $true” command failed with the error: “The parameters MbrType and IsActive cannot be used on a GPT disk.”. So again, I skipped this command.

After all of these issues and tweaks, it worked for me with the “Windows Server 2019 (updated March 2019)” ISO from MSDN.

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My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team and engage with the community and customers around the world. I am located in Switzerland. I am focusing on Microsoft technologies, especially cloud and datacenter solutions based on Microsoft Azure, Azure Stack and Windows Server. Opinions are my own.